itch.io

New Zealand hiking simulator. Walk along some lovely forest paths and take pictures and find secrets. No environmental storytelling. No creeping horror. Just a genuinely peaceful, beautiful area that was very nice to explore on a rainy day like this. Will definitely check out this guy's other two similar games. 4/5

Cute plant-growing idle game with surprisingly elaborate progression involving plants with rare traits, different furniture and art, and an unlockable bathroom! 3/5

If you like the idea of playing in an infinite virtual ballpit, I have the game for you. There's something elementally pleasant about watching waves of colorful tubes flow and then bouncing around a bit. This is available in VR and I bet that's a pretty cool experience. 3/5

Have you ever wondered, what if PT wasn't scary? Well now you can experience existential futility by walking through an endless hotel! As the description says, it's an experiment in procgen by the dev more than an actual game, and as that it's cute but it's not much more. Good sountrack though. 2/5

Interactive coloring book where you wander around a town, painting it. Would probably be great for kids, or adults who want a new variation on the whole "soothing coloring book" thing. I wish there was more than one map, though. 3/5

An autobiographical game telling of the developer's escape from Syria during the civil war with video commentary from the man himself. I actually think this'd be better if it was a bit less of a game - there's some tedious adventure game fetch quests and you move around the bigger maps really slowly - but it's ultimately a raw and emotional story. And it's true. And I'm not rating an actual person's actual traumatic experience on a scale of 1 to 5.

Charming little pet planet game where you make choices to develop the planet you're a god of. I developed a magic kingdom where anime is real but the game ended because I invented game development and then everyone just wanted to make and play video games. I give it a low rating because there's not much at all to it, but it has the charm to be worth playing a run. 2/5

The thing about the huge number of roguelikes in this bundle is that a lot of them are really unique. This one's a neat movement puzzle game based around sliding around a grid to avoid or kill enemies and grab a key to get you to the next floor. Great art, cool gameplay conceit, and unlockable characters. What else do you need? 4/5

A deeply beautiful, sad interactive poetry exhibit. Based around fictional Gujarati poet Mir UmarHassan's satirical poem on the dissolution of the town Matsyapura due to the split of Bombay into Gujarat and Maharashtra, the game has you seeking out blocks of a great tower, which you eat, interspersed with pieces of the poem and a few other scenes. It's an absurdist, moving meditation on the tragedy of governmental erasure of history and the poem, the game, and the closing author's note are all pretty powerful. Wonderful, heartfelt work. 5/5

Explore a haunted Chilean town! Take pictures of ghosts! Talk to the weird inhabitants! Descend into a suffocating labyrinth of heatstroke surrealism! Very weird, very my thing. My only complaint is I'm a bit sad there's a defined ending, as I would've loved to spend more time wandering around taking photos. 4/5

While I respect the effort to make an old-school cRPG in RPG Maker, this ain't it for me. I'm not gonna complain about it being ugly cause hey I like Spiderweb Software, but it's just like... When the first quest is to go into a cellar and fight a dozen rats when the only thing you can really do is attack and hope they miss enough for you to survive you're not starting out in a good place and nothing about the setup made me want to push through. Also seeing the default RPG Maker chest in the middle of a gray cRPG room was kind of funny. 1/5

Action game based around moving in and out of concentric circles to collect energy without getting nailed by chevrons. It's a fun bit of time-killing but doesn't set my world on fire. It also feels... weirdly slow? I feel like it'd be more fun if I could move a bit faster, even if that meant the obstacles moved faster, too. 2/5

This a cute non-violent game about exploring caves and finding treasure. It's somewhat ugly and the writer either doesn't speak English as a first language or is in need of a proof reader, but at the same time it's charming because of that. Not tremendously deep, but I could see going into a trance and spending more time than I'd expect playing this. 3/5

Turn-based roguelite. The description of this sounds like it had some cool stuff going on, but it completely failed to grab me from a gameplay and structure standpoint. 2/5

Walking around on procgen islands taking pictures. Not a lot to it, but it's a pleasant digital toy and the island generation seems surprisingly robust. 3/5

Garish retro solitaire that lets you play breakout to swap a card with a facedown card, which means that it's always winnable. So that's nice. But it's still pretty much just retro-styled solitaire. 2/5

File this one under "cool idea, iffy execution". This is a deck-building RPG, with the gimmick being that the battles are real-time and based on playing cards in grids to knock enemies off the arena, instead of a more MtG-style thing. It's a neat take on a card RPG, the game looks very pretty, and the story is intriguing (and has four campaigns), but it doesn't quite work for me. The combat is cool at its core but feels incredibly repetitive - every fight is pretty much the same and there's a really limited amount of cards - and instead being able to navigate the world you just click on nodes to move around areas, which feels really railroady and weird. A version of this that figured out how to make the combat more interesting and had levels you explore could be really cool. Land of Glass 2? 3/5

Do you like Downwell? Do you like Heavy Bullets? Do you like Gonner? Do you wish they could be combined? Well here's the game for you! Gutwhale is a vertical room-based roguelite where every time you shoot your bullet pops out of your gun and you have to grab it to shoot again. You're rewarded with combo points by grabbing your bullet before it hits the ground and shooting again, so I bet you could do some pretty awesome stunts once you get good. Pretty cool. 4/5

A kinda neat city-building board game survival... thing. The idea is that you're placing tiles to make groups of different types of terrain to complete quests to give you more tiles. When you run out of tiles you lose. It's currently early access and feels a bit barebones - a neat concept, but I'm not sure how long I'd want to spend playing it - so I'm curious to watch where it goes. 3/5

This is like a combination of Kentucky Route Zero, Twin Peaks, Serial Experiments Lain, and Silent Hill, which is to say that it feels like it was designed to appeal to me specifically. It's just an incredibly surreal, creepy, sad experience stuffed with fascinating imagery, some intriguing themes about industrial desolation, and a wonderful heap of weird shit. Can't wait to get deeper in. 5/5

This game just looks so good. Stop-motion rhythm game! Unfortunately I don't like playing it all that much. The rhythm mechanics are really simple but also kind of frustrating and the default Explore mode seems to just go until you raise your score enough to win (which can be lowered by misses) which just makes me feel like I'm trapped in a twee void. The music itself is also kind of unremarkable, though the way it builds up as you hit the shapes is cool. Bit disappointed, but maybe I need to spend more time to get a feel for the gameplay. 2/5

Halfway between a god game and an interactive pet where you control villagers indirectly by making commandments which they can follow, ignore, or even misinterpret. It's a cool idea, reminiscent of Black & White and Majesty, but so much of this game is just kinda hanging out watching your followers run around while you wait for influence to recharge and I don't feel like the game gave me a good idea how to make meaningful decisions on when to make commandments and what those commandments should be. 2/5

Asteroids-esque arena shmup where the gimmick is instead of guns you have a physics-enabled mace hanging from your ship you have to swing into enemies. It's a novel idea, but I personally found it kind of frustrating to aim the mace and there's a lack of really strong a/v style which I think is important to make this kind of game feel good. Maybe it'd be a nice spin on the genre for enthusiasts, but I'm good. 2/5

If there's one thing I'm learning about itch.io, it's that relaxing puzzle games are as much a cottage industry as roguelikes. This is a pretty good one, with a simple mechanic based around erosion and growing plants, sold by really nice presentation. 3/5

Charming word puzzle with a sprinkle of Sudoku-ish spatial reasoning. I like word puzzles and this is a pretty solid one, but it would really need to be a mobile game for me to get the most out of it. I'm rarely gonna sit down at my PC to play something like this, you know? 3/5

A very brief, pleasant interactive story about a frog who wants to be a ballet dancer. It'd be hard to recommend by itself because of how short it is (I finished in 7 minutes), but it's a nice little thing in a bundle like this. Would probably be great for kids who are a bit too young for games with more discrete challenge. 3/5

A soothing golf-based puzzle game that's brilliantly intuitive both in its mechanics and how it introduces new puzzle elements to you. I can definitely see how this could get pretty fiendish later on. 4/5

A very neat variation on the traditional roguelike based around possession mechanics. For some reason, it doesn't totally grab me. Maybe it's just because I compare all roguelikes in this style to the impossibly high bars of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and ToME. Anyway, while for some reason this didn't hook me it objectively seems like a cool spin on this sort of game, so I'd recommend you check it out if you like roguelikes. 3/5

This feels like something truly special. It's a sort of deck-building visual novel with very light resource management aspects. The conversations are played out through simple but enjoyable card "battles", with the cards representing different emotions and approaches to interacting with people. So, the way you build your deck reflects the way you change and grow as a person over the story. The art and music is great, the writing seems strong so far, and it's overall not like anything I've played before and is wonderful. 5/5

A very charming and surprisingly clever little puzzle game based mostly around weird perspective tricks and transformations. Not 100% my thing, but if you like stuff like Samorost and Gorogoa you'll probably be into this. 3/5